Ghosts of Possibility: The Steam Backlog as an Unrealised Imaginary

Epigram #4 — Ghosts of Possibility: The Steam Backlog as an Unrealisied Imaginary Michael Heron Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 4) Haunted Playground Press Abstract. Within popular gaming discourse, the term ‘backlog’ names a familiar anxiety: the ever-growing list of unplayed games that trails behind many players like a guilty shadow. For most, this is a trivial irritation. For some— especiallythoseworkingwithingamestudies—itbecomes an affective burden, a quiet sense of professional insufficiency, or a foreclosure of possibility. The backlog is less a list than an unrealised imaginary: a catalogue of futures that might havebeen, titlesthat promiseinsight, pleasure, orliteracybut remain forever deferred. Academic writing rarely lingers on this phenomenon, and what discussion exists is largely informal. Drawing on autoethnographic practice, this paper examines how obligation, professional identity, curiosity, and the fear of missing out shape our relationships with media we own but have not yet encountered. This work does not claim universality. Instead, it aims to make visible a largely unarticulated aspect of gamer and academic experience: the way unplayed media can haunt us, pressure us, or quietly shape our sense of competence and belonging. Cite as: Heron, M. (2025). Ghosts of Possibility: The Steam Backlog as an Unrealisied Imaginary. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 4). Haunted Playground Press. Available online at: https:// haunted-playground.com Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 1 Introduction Like many diligent gamers, I am the owner of many unplayed games. They have come to me through various routes. They have been gifts from thoughtful relatives. They have been unasked for additions in a game bundle, where a half-dozen or more games have been placed on sale as a package. They have been obtained via subscription services such as Humble Choice and its earlier incarnation of Humble Monthly 1. They have been freebies given away by Steam, Good Old Games (GOG) or Epic Games. Occasionally, and most rarely, they have been intentional purchases. Since these games are, with a few exceptions, invariably digital there are few pragmatic limitations on how many I can have. They don’t take up shelf space. They don’t even take up hard-drive space unless they are installed. The size of my game library can grow at whatever rate my wallet can sustain. I am also a player of board games, but their presence as large and obtrusive physical artefacts ensures a hard upper-limit on how many I can possess. Or at least, how many I can possess in my home. My board game shelves, like an exclusive night club, operate on a one-in-one-out policy. However, there is a psychological burden that comes along with owning so many unplayed games. Despite having no physical weight, they press down on me with a tangibility that can only come from obligation. This is not a phenomenon unique to me – in popular gaming discourse 2the list of unplayed games is called ’The Backlog’ Barr and Copeland-Stewart, 2022; Johnson and Luo, 2019, and its very framing carries with it a recognition of what those unplayed games represent. As the Cambridge Dictionaryputs it, abacklog is ’A largenumberof thingsthat you shouldhavedone before and must do now’. This is completely contrary to the whole ethos of game playing. Or at at least play as we understand it in the traditional context of European enlightenment Trammell, 2020 in which we assume play to be a recreational activity undertaken for fun. The backlog looms. Its presence as a virtualteeteringtowerinourconsciousnesscastsashadoweverytimewebuyanewgame. ’Youshould be playing us’, wail the ghosts of a thousand installations that never happened. And, in my experience at least, the backlog only ever gets bigger. With the presence of game subscriptions, bundles, and freebies from storefronts it sometimes seems like your games are breeding when you’re not looking. The only way to stop the backlog growing is to engage in a kind of acquisitional abstinence. The only way to beat the backlog is to face it head on and say ’It’s time’. In this paper I present a personal account of the gaming phenomenon represented by ’The Backlog’ and the process I went through to finally defeat my own. In this I hope to offer a paper that shines some light on one of those aspects of gamer culture that are rarely given much attention in the academic literature. In this I attempt to surface a personal experience in a way that I hope will be useful within the wider academic literary tradition. 2 Contextualising The Backlog The idea of ’having a backlog’ is not a universal part of being a gamer, serious or otherwise. There are many who can accept that they will own many more games than they will ever play and others that view the concept of a backlog as a dangerous subversion of leisure. Scully-Blaker for example deconstructs the concept within the frame of ’the work of play’, and as an ’instrumentalization of leisure’ without ’proper attention to issues of class and power’. Scully-Blaker, 2021 Trammell offers a 1https://www.humblebundle.com/ 2https://kotaku.com/how-to-chip-away-at-a-massive-games-backlog-1845794480 The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 1 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 broader contextualisation of such backlogs as a form of torture through creating an obligation upon our leisure. Many other have made their peace with the range of their unplayed games Trammell, 2020 3. Much like a bibliophile who owns more books than can be consumed in a human lifetime Perschak, 2017, a large game library can represent opportunity rather than obligation. It is a ’choose your own adventure’ game where the path arcs wildly as current mood is filtered through the treasures of previous acquisition. That the majority of branches will never be explored isn’t a consideration, much less a psychological burden. That is, I would say, a healthy attitude provided the act of acquisition itself is not a mask for other personal problems Dittmar, 2004. However, the presence of ’the backlog’ is identifiable by the many posts and videos that talk about it, of which the footnotes attached here represent a small curated sampling. 456. I cannot point to an academic dissection of the concept - like much of gamer culture, this concept exists only as cosmic background radiation in the informal vocabulary of popular discourse. For some, myself included, the backlog has a more pressing implication - it is a sign of our inability to ’keep up’ with ’the literature’. In my professional life I am a senior lecturer in games at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. I have lectured in many courses over the years, but the most relevant of these is my course Introduction to Game Research. In this I regularly (and often with little success) make what I believe is a vital point in game studies Games, I tell my students, are the primary texts of our discipline. You must play games the same way a literature scholar must read books. To do otherwise is to allow our understanding of the field to atrophy. It’s also important, I say, to play widely - to avoid being trapped in the local optima of personal enthusiasm. We must play, because play is embodied understanding. Play for fun - that’s a different thing. There are some who must treat games this way - more than capsules of engineered frivolity, but as ’contributions to the literature’. If the secret to writing good novels is reading great novels, the secret to good game design is playing games with great design. It is here that we find novelty, innovation, aesthetic experimentation, and the ephemeral link between activity and enjoyment. Truly understanding games requires someone to love games enough to kill them through over-analysis. Game journalists, game makers, and game scholars all have a professional duty to ensure they are literate in their discipline, and that requires doing a mental autopsy on every game we play. It’s difficult to mindlessly enjoy a game when this is part of your job, but in my experience it doesn’t lessen the fun - it converts through the alchemy of enthusiasm into a different kind of fun. It becomes the fun of puzzle solving and of clue-finding. It becomes an excavation in which we dig our trowels deep into the bedrock of the game in the hope we can find treasures worth carting off into our professional practice. 3 The Value of a Personal Perspective The act of exploring the personal has become increasingly popular in the wider academic literature over the past twenty or so years Duncan, 2004; Silverman and Rowe, 2020. There is an old piece of received wisdom in scientific publishing - ’the plural of anecdote is not data’. In that respect, 3https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/why-worry-about-a-games-backlog/50205?page=2 4https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-backlog-spring-cleaning/ 5https://www.nintendolife.com/guides/8-steps-to-making-your-gaming-backlog-a-thing-of-the-past 6https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/tips/video-game-back-log-choice-paralysis-tips/ The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 2 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 autoethnography as an inherently anecdotal form seems at odds with the mores of the traditional academic model as it is understood in many fields. Sara Pikelet on Twitter has perhaps the perfect counter perspectives, - ’they’re not anecdotes. They’re small-batch artisanal data’. Pikelet’sresponserecognisestheimportanceofthesmallscale, personallyconstructednarrative. Anecdotes cannot offer broad general insight on larger systemic issues. They are too mired in personal biases, in personal contexts, and in personal mindsets. The second-person techniques that drive much qualitative research have corrective procedures built into them to permit a researcher to draw actionable insight from multiple personal perspectives. Surveys, focus-groups, interviews and so on must be constructed and conducted in ways that eliminate as much bias as possible if they are to offer rigor in their conclusions. What the personal autoethnography offers though is an impeccable form of engaging with personal meaning Jones et al., 2016 and lived experience Ngunjiri et al., 2010. Where the autoethnographic technique shines most brightly is in terms of capturing truly authentic and fine-grained experience Wiesner, 2020. Its focus on self-usage of technology and self-interrogation of experience Desjardins and Ball, 2018; Holmes and O’Neill, 2010; Roy and Uekusa, 2020 gives a tool through which otherwise unobtainable perspectives can be codified in the academic literature. The format has its inherent limitations Jackson and Mazzei, 2008; Wall, 2008 - in order to have the most genuinely authentic research data one must accept inherent constraints on generalisability. It is though in the very tight coupling of the personal to the impersonal that creates the value of the approach. The observations associated with that union is the research output, and no part of it can survive deconstruction. That is both its methodological weakness and its methodological value - it is in the words of Pascal ’one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression’ Pascal, 2015. Important then to developing a useful autoethnography is to be specific about the personal so as to help others identify what wider lessons might be drawn from an individual account. In that, I will outline the context of my battle with my backlog. I took on my position as a senior lecturer in games in December of 2019. Before that, I was a lecturer in Digital Media at Robert Gordon University, in Scotland. In my previous role, I taught most (all, perhaps) of our games related courses in our various bachelors programs. There was only one course branded as a game development course, but I never let that slow me down. It was my personal decision to introduce games as teaching tools in other contexts - specifically 2D Scripting (’2D games would be ideal for that!’), and User Centred Design (’games need to be designed, and the user should be at the centre!’). Games were what my students coded in programming courses (’Games are an ideal programming exercise!’). Games were my research area, and ’research informed teaching’ is a philosophy I consider vital to effective education within a university. I can probably admit a certain amount of post-decision rationalisation. There I was a Digital Media lecturer. Now I am working directly with the word games in my job title. Previously I could get by just by playing games as a hobby - games as designed artefacts were only ever a secondary aspect of my courses. ’Fun’ was never a quality of a submission upon which students were assessed. That no longer holds true – it is now a professional obligation of mine to keep myself abreast of the literature, and that literature is predominantly game-related. Pre December 2019, my backlog was an irritation. We can think of that as the ’pre-crisis’ period. Post December 2019, managing it became a professional obligation. That’s the ’post-crisis’ period. That’s the point where my previous lax attitude towards my backlog counted, in my own mind, as a form of retroactive professional malpractice. In order to advise students on games, and to provide them with suitable suggestions for games they should explore to refine their own sensibilities, I needed to ’delve into the The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 3 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 literature’. Extracting from a blog post I wrote in March of 2022, I described my situation thusly: So it’s not okay for me, for example, to have never played Saints Row 4. I have now – it’s awesome – and now I can meaningfully situate it within a wider gaming landscape in relation to the Grand Theft Auto games. I can compare and contrast, and importantly offer context to students who want toexplore games of this nature. I’m not just drawing from onelineage, I’mdrawing from two. Ihad playedtheoriginal SaintsRow atthetime of its release and largely dismissed the series as ‘inferior GTA clones’. That’s unfair in the modern frame of reference – Saints Row 4 is its own joyful, bombastic and lunatic thing. Now I know that. I’ve been bemoaning the familiarity of chamber-based puzzle games because they all basicallyhaveone innovationandthen allthesame puzzlesI’veseenbefore. So whensomething likethe Swapper comes alongand surprises me…well, then Ilearn abit more about game design than I knew before. There are puzzles in there that are fiendish and original and that was a joy to behold. Without this dedicated investigation of the wider ’gaming literature’, my ability to advise students around the design of chamber-based puzzle games (such as Portal Adams et al., 2016; The Turing Test Bosman, 2020; The Talos Principle Tuckett, 2017) lacked an important additional example – The Swapper Webber and Griliopoulos, 2017. Missing these puzzle pieces give a distorted view of the gaming landscape while reducing the quality of insight I can provide. If my only frame of reference is Portal, then all my advice will be Portal flavoured. 4 Methodology and Surrounding Context I run a research blog called Meeple Like Us Heron et al., 2018a, 2018b, and as part of that I have a small Patreon account. For the$1 reward level, I produce amonthly newsletterthat givesmini-reviews of movies, television shows and video games that I have tried out. Making use of this I was able to reconstruct a profile of my video gaming activity in 2019, which was a relatively typical year for me - the closest I can come to a ’control year’ for my game-playing activity in the pre-crisis period. I only kept stats here for games that I completed, rather than games I played and abandoned. And for that, it’s important for us to have a shared conception of what it means to complete a game. I have used the following as my long-standing definition. A game is completed when I have: 1. seen the end-credits of a traditional single player campaign (known in gamer discourse as an any% run Hemmingsen, 2021), or 2. when I have reached the point that I credibly believe I have seen everything new and/or interesting that a game has to offer. This definition is core to the rest of this paper, so it is worth investigating the implications of these principles. For the first, seeing the end credits does not necessarily imply that I have seen everything a game has to offer. In this we might offer up two particular examples, both of which I counted as ’completed’ in my stats. The first is Nier: Automata Gallagher, 2018 which is designed around The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 4 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 multiple playthroughs, each of which reveals different aspects of the story and the relationships of its characters. It introduces new story elements, new game protagonists, and new game mechanics for several of these. AI: The Somnium Files Chunsoft, 2019 has a similar approach in which one playthrough represents a single path through a mystery, and it is only through taking multiple paths throughthestorythatyou cantruly understand what is happening. So in marking these as ’complete’, an argument can be made as to whether this is authentically true in a way that an externalaudit would support. However, I intensely disliked both games so I was happy to have a reason to bail out. For the second criteria, this is inherently subjective and in many cases impossible to judge. This is the definition I use for games that do not have a traditional single-player campaign. For this I tend to use a loose definition of repetition - when I see game elements being repeated or remixed in a way that fundamentally demonstrates the well of novelty has run dry. For this, we might use the example of Vampire Survivors Poncle, 2022, in which the game is primarily built around unlocking weapons and characters throughaccomplishing particular goals. However, Ido notconsider itnew orinteresting to unlock a weapon that does 20 damage in a circle around my character versus one that does 15 damage in a spiral. I don’t consider characters particularly novel when the sole difference is in stat makeup or initial weapon loadout. As such, when I got to the levels where I just start re-encountering previous enemies, I considered it complete long before I had actually seen the end credits (around eight hours to add it to the spreadsheet, as opposed to the 120 hours for which I have actually played it. It’s really good). However, in marking some games as complete there is a psychological itch that goes along with it. If I had to justify the completion of certain games to someone else, I would likely struggle to authentically defend their status. When that happens, I mark each of these games with a ’soft asterisk’, which has an impact on how I evaluate them methodologically for the process described later. Other games get a ’hard asterisk’, which is less about how I would justify their completion to other people and more about how I justify it to myself. In 2020 for example I ’completed’ a game called Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock Koistinen et al., 2021. It was a perfectly enjoyable game except for one mission which I tried fifteen times with no sign of likely future success. The game is one of turn-based tactical planning in which you construct fleets of spaceships to defeat the enemy Cylons. I could find no combination of ships, tactics or strategies that got me past the first few minutes of the engagement. And so I cheated. I used a trainer to get past that mission, and then made my way happily through the rest of the game without it. So I ’completed’ it, but inauthentically - I had to cheat. I completed the classic Lucasarts point and click adventure Grim Fandango Fandango, 1998 in 2022. I found the puzzle design so obtuse that I needed to regularly employ a walkthrough - which is to say a written solution that could be followed step-by-step to arrive at the game’s conclusion Nylund, 2015. That too is ’completed’ - but both games get hard asterisks. This is important, because both 2020 and 2022 were part of separate structured attempts to manage my backlog. In 2020 I set myself a goal of completing fifty-two games over the year - an average of one a week. In 2022 I set myself the challenge of completing 100 games in the year. Only games without asterisks counted towards these target figures. In this the asterisk serves as methodological quality assurance and enforcer of self-control. I have to complete the games in a way that serves my wider goal of conquering the literature. The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 5 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 5 Results This gives us then four years of data that can be used to provide some quantitative context to this personal account: 1. 2019, the pre-crisis control year, baseline gameplaying behaviour. 2. 2020, post-crisis year, challenge to complete 52 games 3. 2021, post-crisis control year, baseline gameplaying behaviour 4. 2022, post-crisis year, challenge to complete 100 games And in this, I have some hard statistics that can be provided on the basis of the definition of completed outlined above, shown in Table 1. Year Completions Hard Asterisks Soft Asterisks Mean Game Length (hours) Median Game Length (hours) Total Hours Played Mean Game Rating Std. Dev Of Rating 2019 17 0 0 N/A N/A N/A 3.36 0.59 2020 76 6 0 14.3 11 1087 3.34 0.93 2021 26 2 0 18.27 14 475 4.02 0.92 2022 115 2 9 14.37 10 1653 3.35 0.97 Table 1: Stats from four years of backlog clearing As my 2019 playing behaviour was reconstructed from Patreon posts, information regarding game length and hours played is lost. From 2020 onwards, I have been recording this information on a regular basis in a spreadsheet. For hours played, this is recorded on the basis of which hour period I am within, rather than which has passed. For example, a game that had been played for 15 minutes would count as a 1 hour game. A game played for fourteen hours and 55 minutes would count as a 15 hour game. As such, the numbers are skewed a little high, but gameplay stats as provided by Switch and Steam are only ever rough instruments at the best of times. In addition to the gameplay stats, I also recorded my personal impressions of each game alongside a longer review that was made available to Patron supporters. This is a star rating, out of five, consistent with the longer form board-game reviews I do on Meeple Like Us. In 2019, I did what the Raptitude blog has called a ’Depth Year’ 7, which is to say a year in which I did not start any new hobbies, did not buy any new media, and instead immersed myself in the things I already owned. At the end of this depth year, I instituted a policy for my video game acquisitions. For every game I buy, I must complete three others. This ’three out, one in’ rule has been a hard requirement for all post-crisis years, except not really because it only counts for intentional acquisitions. It doesn’t count forthe games that come as part of my monthly subscription to Humble Choice, for reasons that can only be described as ’self-deluded hypocrisy’. For games that I play a reasonable amount (2 hours) but abandon, they count as a third of a credit. From 2019 onward, I was also tracking my ’abandon rate’ as part of this credit allowance system. Abandoned games do not count towards completions as per the table above, but they do count towards games being removed from the backlog. As with the game hours, I was unable to reconstruct the data for abandoned games for 2019. 7https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/2019-michaels-year-of-depth/ The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 6 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 Year Completed Games Abandoned Games Abandon Proportion 2019 17 N/A N/A 2020 76 47 38% 2021 26 11 20% 2022 115 28 19% Table 2: Completion versus abandon stats However, in 2022 I did a second depth year, in which the restriction was explicitly ’No new games until I complete everything on my backlog’, which brings us to a critical question - how big was my backlog at that point? In 2019, my library of unplayed games on Steam stood at 760 titles. As a result of documenting my depth year, I captured that stat in December of 2019. It thus began the year at 777 games at a minimum, since I completed 17 games in that year and acquired no others. Over the period 2020 to the end of 2022, I added 41 ’intentional purchase’ games to my library, and we can estimate perhaps 250 games from Humble Choice. We can calculate from this data that to the 760 game backlog in 2019 I added perhaps 400 games to my library between then and 2022. And over that period, I completed 217 games. In terms of the ’intentional purchases’, I ’dealt with’ (as in, completed or purposefully abandoned) that was 40 of the 41. The one remaining game is Fallout 76, which I ’intend to get to’. The net result then of my attempt to reduce my backlog has been to limit its increase in size to a mere 283 titles. Thus the weight of a backlog - despite efforts to reduce it, it only seems to grow. That brings us to the final part of methodology for this project - triage. I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek about these numbers, because most of the games that got added to my unplayed list didn’t really get added to the ’backlog’ as I mentally categorise it. The backlog is a conscious subset of unplayed games, made up of those titles that I want to play and those that I feel I should play. As such, in 2020 I partitioned my collection into two categories. ’Want to play’ and ’Don’t care’. The mere fact of organizing games into a ’don’t care’ pile had a revelatory effect on how I viewed my library. It made things manageable. And importantly, it made it look like resolving the backlog was an achievable long term goal. Instead of a growing list of obligations, I had an actual plan Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011. In 2022, I refined this further into multiple categories: ’Immediate playlist’, which contained the set of games from which I would choose my next game to play. ’Long term playlist’, which was the collectionfromwhichtheimmediateplaylist wasrefilled. Thosetwowere separatedout in an attempt to mitigate the sense of choice paralysis that can be associated with having too many options at any one time Schwartz, 2004. ’Not currently interested’ contained the majority of games, which were things that I owned but had no specific interest in playing. The best innovation though was the ’won’t play’ list, which contained those games that I actively decided were not for me, or had technical barriers to being played on modern hardware. Any game with a specifically multiplayer focus went in there, since I am an old man and it is difficult to get friends together for an evening of gaming. The alternative is playing with public The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places 7 Haunted Playground Epigrams #4 groups and the last time I did that I spent more time than I would like listening to racists shouting at me for how badly I was playing. ThismeantthatIhada’worthwhile’backlogmadeupofmyimmediateandlong-termplaylists,rather than a largely undifferentiated list of ’Games that look fun’ versus ’games that don’t look fun’. This additional subdividing gave a pipeline to the backlog. Games were picked from the immediate playlist. When one was completed or abandoned, I’d pick a replacement from the long term playlist. When an owned game of particular note came to my attention (for example, when a student asked me about it or a friend recommended it) I would check to see if I owned it. If I did it would be moved from the ’not currently interested’ list to the ’long term playlist’. Games could be moved into ’Won’t play’ largely at will. They didn’t count as credits in the three-out-one-in system. They didn’t count as ’completions’. But they did count as ’being removed from the backlog’. The extent to which I persevered with a game then became a function of how important I thought it was. Games which I intentionally bought could not be put into the ’Won’t Play’ list. They needed to be completed or abandoned after giving them a fair shake. When I instantiated this system in May of 2022, I had 15 games in the immediate playlist, 120 in the long term list, 250 in the ’not currently interested’ list, and the rest languished in the ’Won’t Play’ list. As of December 2022, it stood at 0 in the immediate playlist, 0 in the long term play list, 242 in the Not Currently Interested list, and everything else was mentally irrelevant.. 6 Making the Cut As part of professional obligation outlined above, the nature of my backlog is perhaps somewhat niche - not merely made up of ’the great games you should play before you die’, but also those games that are especially novel; or innovative; or or divisive. The question of why a game arrives, or departs, my backlog is driven by factors other than my own enthusiasm for the title. It is also driven by a factor that plagues game academia - we have no shared conception of anything as cohesive as a canon of games we can expect everyone to have played. Scholars of Western classical literature can rely on Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens as the bedrock of their discipline. Games scholars have no equivalent fixed points of reference. Lacking such a reference requires broad literacy across a wide variety of gaming properties so as to anchor discourse onto touchstones that are shared with students. As such, being selected as an entry for my long-term playlist requires some consideration of what its presence will add to my professional practice. It’s not sufficient for me to simply mark a game as ’it’s just not for me’. There are some exclusion criteria I employ, based on what I know of my own preferences. I understand these biases and communicate them to students when discussion games - sometimes it’s mostly important to articulate why you don’t like something. One particularly relevant example is this - I have never completed a Dark Souls game. The closest I have got is by completing Jedi: Fallen Order Guzsvinecz, 2023, a game which shares DNA but is usually considered as a ’Soulslite’ game - as in, a lighter, breezier version of its harsh, stern parents. Each Dark Souls game got abandoned after a couple of hours. 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